The rate of cloud adoption has increased rapidly, with more and more computing being pushed into the cloud, a trend identified in Serviceteam IT’s Cloud Snapshot Survey 2017. This growth in cloud computing has led to the development of networks of large data centres. However, this is already starting to slow, with an ever-increasing amount of computing moving back to the ‘edge’ of local networks. Processing will always occur wherever it is best placed for a given application at a given time and cloud has given us flexibility of computing resources; but we can’t help but think that reliable, elastic and on-demand networking is imperative to deliver the future.

Cloud may be the heart of many companies’ infrastructure but it would be nothing without the veins of connectivity that keep the data flowing. The UK Cloud Snapshot Survey 2017 asked what cloud connection companies use to access their cloud solutions. This was split out from their normal office connectivity unless they relied on an open public cloud connection.